Companies conducting litigation face exhaustive legal discovery requests that require the collection of substantial amounts of electronic data, including user-created and/or user-modified files stored on network storage devices residing on the companies' networks. Collecting this data is a labor intensive process that requires active participation from the employees of the company and substantial work by those managing the discovery process. Current methods require that the employee herself be responsible for identifying the particular network storage devices where she has stored and/or accessed and modified files. Because the employee may forget where she has stored certain files and/or may not be able to communicate where files are stored because she does not fully understand the architecture of the network, the possibility exists that the employee could inadvertently fail to disclose certain network storage devices that she uses, leading the discovery managers to unintentionally fail to collect potentially relevant data. Furthermore, it is possible that an employee wishing to circumvent the collection process could intentionally omit certain storage devices when making her mandatory disclosure to discovery managers.
In terms of the actual collection process, current methods require manually accessing the identified network storage areas and manually copying of the files located therein. This time-consuming process does not ensure that all files belonging to the targeted employee are obtained. In addition, in networks where aliases may be used, it is possible that the discovery manager attempting to identify files for collection may overlook files that actually belong to the targeted employee. In conclusion, it is apparent that current electronic discovery solutions rely too much on the information communicated by the particular individual whose data is being collected and cause tedious amounts of work for discovery managers. Therefore, there is a need for an automated electronic discovery system and method that easily identifies files stored in network storage areas that belong to an individual and automatically collects those identified files, with little to no input from the discovery process managers or the individual whose files are being collected.